The National Hockey League and their COVID-19 Response

The COVID-19 global pandemic has significantly impacted lives and livelihoods across the globe as the virus continues to spread worldwide and new variants emerge. COVID-19 has essentially affected every sector of the economy and society as governments are forced to adopt measures to contain its spread. One of the areas that have been affected by the spread of the virus is sports. National sports leagues such as the National Hockey League (NHL) have been affected. In the initial stages of the pandemic, NHL suspended all sporting activities just like other national sports leagues in effort to curb the spread of the virus. However, the pandemic still rages on, which implies that NHL has to find better ways of COVID-19 response amidst the emergence of new variants like the Delta variant. This segment provides suggestions for improving NHLs response to the pandemic based on insights obtained from other organizations responses to the pandemic.

Suggestions for Improving Response

As previously indicated, the National Hockey Leagues initial response to the COVID-19 virus in March 2020 was to suspend all sporting activities. However, the organization resumed these activities in August 2020 and established measures that would help curb the spread of the virus among players and in the overall organization. The organization adopted these response measures on grounds that it has a responsibility to ensure the safety of all its stakeholders (Gregory, 2020). NHLs COVID-19 response was spread in four major phases, namely self-isolation, testing in training facilities, testing in training camps, and regular testing. These initiatives together with compliance with all the appropriate protocols played a crucial role in preventing the spread of the virus within NHL and its associated activities.

Despite playing a crucial role in curbing the spread of the virus, the response measures adopted by NHL were not entirely effective even as they contributed to an unprecedented hockey season. This implies that NHL could have adopted alternative or more measures to improve response to the COVID-19 crisis. Mont, Curtis & Palgan (2021) state that organizational responses to the COVID-19 pandemic were affected by the lack of extensive literature on response to epidemics. Existing literature mostly focuses on organizational traditional threats like human-error incidents and natural disasters. Therefore, the response strategies like those adopted by the NHL were primarily limited to existing response strategies to conventional threats and incidents. However, NHLs response strategies could have been improved by adopting slightly different approaches to the initial suspension of all sporting activities...

Some of the suggestions for improved response to the crisis/pandemic include:

Management of Daily Operations

As noted by Gregory (2020), NHLs initial response to the COVID-19 pandemic was to halt all operations and sporting activities. This included postponing the season and holding emergency meetings to determine the next course of action. In so doing, the organization adopted measures or strategies implemented by other sporting associations like the NBA. The prompt suspension of games had a significant impact on the league and the many livelihoods depending on it. Additionally, this move has significant financial implications because NHL is a billion-dollar industry or business. At the time of suspension, no one in the leagues circle had been diagnosed with COVID-19.

Even though the leagues suspension was critical in helping curb the spread of the virus, NHL could have better responded by managing daily operations rather than halting the league. As part of the management of daily operations, NHL could have reduced parts of its operations and implementing local response for local contexts. Mont, Curtis & Palgan (2021) identify the management of daily operations as part of organization-oriented response strategies for the global pandemic. The reduction of parts of operations and implementation of local response for local contexts would have enabled the NHL to continue operating and minimize the financial and additional implications associated with temporal closure/suspension of...

…agreed to do this through solidarity payments as well as extra funding in the form of grants. These efforts were geared toward assisting League One and Two clubs meet their obligations. For EFL clubs, this initiative enabled them to meet their operational costs up to date, particularly wages. Furthermore, EPL offered Championship clubs a 200 million loan to help cater for outstanding employment taxes owed to HMRC (Maguire, 2021). While there were concerns on whether the financial support would be adequate for EFL, League One, and League Two clubs, they served as a new business model that would help deal with the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on the respective leagues.

For NHL, the adoption of such measures of offering financial support would have served as an improved COVID-19 response strategy. This would have helped mitigate losses on the part of clubs and the overall league. Similar to EPLs case, financial support would have enabled clubs to meet their obligations for the rest of the season amidst reduced operations. Such support would have been timely and played a crucial part in ensuring clubs meet their operational costs. This crisis management strategy would have helped lessen the impact of the pandemic and ensured NHL remained operational amidst the pandemic.

In conclusion, the COVID-19 global pandemic has had significant impacts on societies across the world. The effect of the pandemic has been felt at the individual and organizational level as the virus has brought significant disruptions to peoples lives. The sports industry including the National Hockey League has also been affected by the pandemic and its disruptions. NHL responded to the crisis by suspending the league temporarily similar to other sporting bodies like the NBA. However, this strategy ended up having more impact on clubs though it helped to curb the spread of the virus. Based on insights obtained from the course and other organizaions, NHL could have improved its response by adopting other strategies for better crisis…